The Mumbai airport will have 24-hour cross-runway operations from Monday to reduce flight delays, but a near mishap shows how ill-prepared they are.
The Mumbai airport will have 24-hour cross-runway operations from Monday to reduce flight delays, but a near mishap on Sunday highlighted how ill-prepared the Mumbai Air Traffic Control (ATC) is to handle the operations.
On Sunday, at 7.57 am, an Air India (AI) and a Jet Airways flights proceeded to take off at the same time.
The Jet Airways flight to Kolkata was lined up on runway 14 of 14-32 for an 8am departure. A Saudi Airlines flight SV 742 Riyadh-Mumbai had landed on runway 09 of 09-27 at 7.40am. “After the Saudi Airlines flight exited the runway, AI’s Mumbai-Delhi-Shanghai flight AI 348 was asked to line up on the main runway 27 of 09-27,” an ATC official said.
At 7:56:30 am, the ATC gave clearance to Jet Airways to take off and the pilot started speeding up on the runway 14 of 14-32 at 60 nautical miles.
“The AI plane also started moving on runway 27 of 09-27. The ATC official was surprised as the AI pilot was not given the permission to take off. And he yelled ‘AI abort, abort’. The AI pilot applied the brakes after travelling 500 metres,” a Mumbai airport source said.
Hearing the instructions to the AI pilot, even the Jet pilot aborted his take off. “Our pilot was given the clearance to take off but as a precautionary measure he aborted it,” a spokesperson for Jet Airways said. The flight then took off for Kolkata at 9.22am, while the AI flight left at 11am.
An inquiry is being conducted by the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). “The preliminary reports we have got from the ATC indicates that only the Jet Airways flight was given clearance for a take-off,” Nasim Zaidi, director general of civil aviation, said.
“We are short-staffed since 35 out of 214 of our officials have been transferred,” an ATC official said not wanting to be named. “This makes it difficult for us to handle
cross-runway operations properly.”
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